Rural chiefs favour GM
New Zealand could not pretend to be an agricultural Silicon Valley if it did not embrace genetic modification, says farming leader Malcolm Bailey.
‘‘It would be Silicon Valley without the silicon,’’ he told the Future Farms conference in Palmerston North.
Bailey, who is chairman of the Dairy Companies Association of New Zealand and former Federated Farmers president, said there were different types of GM. He was not advocating the use of transgenics, where genes from a plant are mixed with those from an animal.
‘‘The technology is getting better and better. What are we prepared to do in New Zealand? A lot of countries don’t even consider what they are doing as GM, but just as another advanced form of plant breeding.’’
Bailey said New Zealand would have problems retaining scientists in the country because they would pursue research opportunities overseas. Without GM, which promised more efficient use of resources, it was likely more rainforests would be cut down to make way for conventional farming.
Bailey’s call was backed by Ian Proudfoot, head of agribusiness at KPMG, who agreed some forms of GM would never be accepted in New Zealand.
‘‘We give GM one name, but there are many sorts. It needs to be broken up.’’
Bailey said other areas would help unlock agricultural production. He compared New Zealand with the Netherlands, the latter the second largest food exporter after the United States but with a much smaller population. The Dutch emphasised developing and controlling intellectual property, for example plant rights; investing in research and development; education, developing links with universities, and producing what consumers want.
New Zealand invested 1.2 per cent of GDP into research, whereas in the Netherlands it was 2 per cent, and Israel 4.2 per cent.
Farmers needed to have an incentive to produce higher value goods. Bailey said the dairy industry had moved to some extent to paying higher prices for certain types of milk. However, meat processing companies had much more work to do to differentiate between farmers who supplied a better product than others.
Proudfoot said President Donald Trump offered opportunities for New Zealand, as well as risks. Mexico, a large market for the US, had slowed buying dairy products from its northern neighbour, a gap that could be filled by New Zealand.
He raised the prospect of the United Kingdom becoming a cornerstone partner in a remodelled trade agreement with the countries that had negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal. And he speculated that the US Farm Bill, on which it spends $70 billion a year as food assistance to poor Americans, might be gutted to allow a jump in defence spending.
Organic producers should look to the US because the administration was considering lowering the threshold to be become organic.
Proudfoot said disruption confronted the sector, with large scale changes around the corner. Pharmaceutical and food companies were blurring the lines between the two, with a focus on food that made people healthy.